A month ago Google introduced a new way to handle ads, and simply that is you don’t have to mess around with placing adds. You put your code in and then you tell Google “Gimme them auto ads!” and they add in … well … ads.

Depending on your options, you can show in-article ads or just section ones, and it comes out looking a bit like this:

There are obvious pros to this, and mostly it’s that I don’t have to think about where an ad is going to go. I can tell Google “Show a medium amount of ads where you think is best” and walk away. I don’t have to worry about which ads to use. Also they use Google’s ‘what fits with the content’ magic algorithm.

But.

I can’t exclude certain areas.

Which means on one of my sites has an extra hunk of ads in the headers, as Google inserted an ad in each section. And I can’t tell it not to put adds in specific sections. I can tell it not to put ads on specific pages, and with Genesis I can do that from within WordPress, but the options just aren’t quite where I want. Yet.